Publisher's Weekly Starred Review. Twenty years after her last novel, On Double Tracks, Pinder again shares her remarkable and unique prose gifts in this intensely-moving novel that explores the mysteries of the human heart and soul. Canadian Alix Purcell is at a crossroads, having left her lover and her job at a publishing house. An unusual opportunity presents itself when she's approached to write the libretto for an opera based on the life of Austin Hart, an anthropologist who took his own life in the mid-19th century shortly after his controversial decision to cut down an enormous stand of totem poles and have them shipped to museums. Having contemplated suicide herself, Purcell feels an affinity for her subject and a passionate desire to unravel the truth about what led him to such a dark place. Her quest coincides with a precipitous decline in her mother's health, which forces her to try to heal long-standing rifts between them. Pinder's ability to craft memorable lines (The roadway to my history was always under construction), only enhance her unflinching look at a woman's struggle to find both peace and professional satisfaction. Publisher s Weekly April 4, 2012

Bring Me One Of Everything

Literature & Fiction

Leslie Hall Pinder

Literary

Grey Swan Press

Under The House

“Intense and compassionate, Pinder's story skirts sensationalism by focusing on character. It is a powerful tale.” —Publishers Weekly (New York) “A haunting first novel by a writer of great talent and sensitivity. It treats a difficult theme with humanity and admirable complexity.” —Margaret Atwood “Pinder's prose is stark and subtle—with barely a description of people or places she creates a chilling and claustrophobic picture of the sinister side of family life.” —The Sunday Times (London) --------------------------------------------- UNDER THE HOUSE is the story of the Rathbones, a prominent Saskatchewan family who live with a secret they're determined to keep. Only young Evelyn finds the courage to break down the wall of silence that keeps the truth at bay. Her ally is Aunt Maude, a timid woman who has lived with the secret from childhood. The secret made her different, the butt of playground jokes. The secret was like the apples in the cellar under the house-rotting, sticky and soft. It is timing that gives this novel its strength, from the confused wanderings of Aunt Maude at the start to the unanswered letter from her sister which ends it. Along the way, Leslie Hall Pinder gives herself every opportunity, right down to a courtroom scene, for sensation and melodrama, and skillfully resists each one in favor of her long-term aim: the creation of a family so determined not to look back at their past that they never see the chains that bind them to it.

Under the House

Genre Fiction

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Books by Leslie Hall Pinder